One the most famous blogs, the Huffington Post, which recently won the Pulitzer prize for journalism, is launching a new initiative. From next June in the USA it will be possible to download on your mobile or on your iPad an application called ‘GPS for the Soul’.

Here is how it works: touching a telephone sensor will measure the current level of stress you are experiencing,
based on your heart rate and it fluctuations. At this point the application will indicate what you must do to reduce stress, if listening to music, reading a poem, looking at photos of people you love or of a particular place, or a breathing exercise. Or even all of these things together.
Naturally everyone will be able to personalise their own application, adding music and photos that they like. I am sure that this application will be very successful (to tell the truth I think that I will also download it), but the thing that struck me the most was that the web is becoming ever more a therapeutic asylum.

The first results of studies which compare a traditional treatment between a doctor and a patient with that created by a personalised programme which the patient can access via a computer, are already being examined. Apparently there is no difference between the direct contact and the person/machine contact. Overall technology is not only changing our work habits but it is also substituting slowly but surely contact-based therapy. In a related post about the ethics of doctors and patients being friends on Facebook, many spoke of the importance of having a friendly rapport with their own doctor for their own piece of mind. At this point, what do we think about these changes?